Friday, March 10, 2017

In Bamidbar 20:8, G-d instructs Moshe, “And you shall speak to the stone,” from which Rabbi Abba bar Eban derived a commandment to lecture the United Nations on behalf of G-d. (Eduyot 3:7) Rabbi Abba’s protégés expanded the mitzvah to include lecturing all ignorant people, and Rabba Caroline Glick expanded it further to include talking to actual rocks. (Shabbat, Perek Rabbi Elazar d’Milah) Sefer HaChinuch lists this as the Torah’s 618th mitzvah: Jewsplaining. Israelis prefer to call it Hasbara, meaning “condescension”.

Within this daily mitzvah, every Jew is obligated to seek out a hostile listener and explain the Middle East to him/her/it for at least eighteen minutes, without convincing him/her/it. Children may also be obligated, because Jewsplaining requires neither intelligence nor maturity, only a willingness to loudly repeat one-sided tropes like “Jordan is the actual Palestinian state” and “Israel invented oxygen, go boycott oxygen” until the other side draws a weapon or walks away.

One does not recite a blessing before Jewsplaining. Per Rashba (1:18), we do not recite a blessing for a mitzvah which depends on another party for its fulfillment; one example is tzedakah, since the intended recipient might decline. Regarding Jewsplaining, the mitzvah is fulfilled only if the listener remains deaf like a stone, and so one’s success depends on the listener being stubborn. Therefore, there is no blessing. [Note, though, that some authorities rule that the Jewsplainer fulfills her obligation so long as she thinks convincing the listener is impossible. Even if the listener changes his mind, it may be assumed that he was already uncertain, and the speaker’s role was only indirect grama.]

I would have written more, such as regarding the Karaites over at the New Israel Fund and their interpretation of this mitzvah, but there was no room in our publication...

Monday, March 6, 2017

I presented this derashah on Shabbos, and it was sufficiently well-received for me to post it here as well:

Children of the 1970’s and 1980’s will remember the movie Wargames,
in which Matthew Broderick hacked into the Pentagon’s central computer system –
the WOPR – and accidentally started playing a real-world version of a game
called Global Thermonuclear War. At the end of the movie, the WOPR computer
observed that war is, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Tanach and Talmud seem to come to the same negative conclusion
regarding war:

·Look at our earliest biblical
battles:

oAvraham battles an alliance
of four kings to save his brother-in-law Lot; the Talmud[1]
says that Avraham was then punished for drafting his students to fight in the
war.

oYaakov prepared to fight
against Esav, and we are told, ויירא יעקב מאד ויצר לו, Yaakov was afraid, and he was troubled.
Midrashim[2]
explain: Yaakov was afraid lest he be killed, but he was also disturbed by the
possibility of killing others, apparently even in self-defense.

oShortly thereafter, Shimon
and Levi smashed the city of Shechem and saved their sister Dinah. Yaakov
responded, “You have muddied my name in the eyes of the nations of the land!”

·Fast-forward to Nach, where
we meet Dovid haMelech, who is told by G-d that he cannot build the Beit
haMikdash because דמים רבים שפכת ארצה לפני, You have spilled much blood – but Ramban[3]
says that this blood was spilled in wars ordered by Gd!

·Or since Purim is coming, read Megilat Esther – the Jews didn’t want to go
to war, even in their own self-defense. Esther and Mordechai pleaded with
Achashverosh to rescind the decree against them, and only when he refused were
they forced to resort to battle.[4]

·In this light, it’s no wonder that we are prohibited from using iron to
shape the stones of the mizbeiach; כי חרבך
הנפת עליה, your
sword is an unwanted, unrighteous weapon of death.

It seems that the WOPR is indeed correct about war – the
only way to win is not to play!

The problem is that Judaism simultaneously depicts war as a
righteous, even glorious pursuit!

The Torah presents war as a mitzvah:

·וכי
תבאו מלחמה בארצכם על הצר הצורר אתכם והרעותם בחצוצרות – When you go to war, not if you go to war,
against the enemies who attack you in your land, blow the trumpets and Gd will
save you.[5]

·כי תצא
למלחמה על אויביך – When
you go to war against your enemies

·לא
תכרות להם ברית – Do
not make peace treaties with the seven Canaanite nations.

And not only is war a
mitzvah, but our Sages teach that war is a religious act pursued by righteous
figures, specifically:

·According to a mishnah, the Sanhedrin, the high religious court, approves
all wars;

·The Talmud describes Shaul’s general Doeg, and Dovid haMelech, and his Shlomo’s
general Benayahu ben Yehoyada, as both warriors and Torah scholars;

·The Talmud teaches that Jewish soldiers were given the opportunity to
retreat from the battlefield if they had any sin on their records, however
minor, leaving an army of soldiers who would be ideal tzaddikim.

We did not go as far as
the Greeks, with Plato’s declaration that one must engage in military service
in order to be a complete person – but we seem to have come pretty close!

So how do we reconcile
biblical and rabbinic negativity toward war and warriors, with the idea that
war is a great mitzvah, waged by our best and brightest? And to apply this
today - how should we look at serving in our own IDF?

We could argue that war
is simply a בדיעבד, a
necessary evil; other mitzvot are necessary evils, too, like returning stolen
goods and punishing criminals in beit din. If we were worthy, Hashem would
battle our enemies and we would not need to fight, but we have not been worthy
and so we have needed to fight.

The idea that war is a
concession to reality is not new to Judaism; almost two thousand years ago, the
Talmud[6]
blamed our wars on the Golden Calf. Rav Ada, son of Rabbi Chanina declared: If
we had not created the Golden Calf, Tanach would have been very short – we
would have needed only the Chumash, and the book of Yehoshua describing the
division of the Land of Israel. As Rav Kook explained:[7]
We would have faced none of the wars and challenges and Divine rebukes which
fill the rest of Tanach. Our righteousness would have awed the nations of the
land, and we would not have needed to fight.[8]

Indeed, according to the
Rambam these bedieved wars were an undesirable, weak and inferior means of
sanctifying the land of Israel. He wrote[9]
that sanctity which comes about via the sword can also be removed by the sword,
and so the kedushah conferred by Yehoshua through battle was actually removed
by the Babylonians when they conquered us.

Within this view, the
ideal would be for victory to come through Divine intervention. Perhaps this is
why our Sages looked for less bloody ways to re-interpret the violent exploits
of our greatest leaders.

·Moshe kills an Egyptian who is beating a Jew – but Avot d'Rabbi Natan[10]
says he did it by invoking the Name of Gd.

·The book of Shoftim says that Kalev marries off his daughter to the shofeit
Otniel ben Kenaz, after he conquers the city of Kiryat Sefer – but according to
the Talmud,[11] what
Otniel actually did in “Kiryat Sefer” was to teach hundreds of laws which had
been forgotten upon Moshe’s death.

Both of these derashot
are based on solid textual analysis, but they also reflect a certain
perspective: War represents a failure of spirituality, and our greatest leaders
did not need to resort to fisticuffs.

In truth, this bedieved
view of war may be part of a broader philosophical view of this world as a
perfect planet shaped by imperfect people:

·We should receive food from the heavens or miraculous crops, but because we
are imperfect, we need to plow and plant and harvest.

·We should be healed of disease upon praying to Gd, but because we are imperfect,
we need to rely on painful, expensive and uncertain medicines.

·And we should be protected from enemies without fighting, but because we
are imperfect, we must go to war.

So the WOPR is indeed
correct; the only winning move is not to play – but sometimes you don’t have
another option.

But there is another layer
to war. When the Torah depicts war as religious and righteous, it is because
war is not only the act of bludgeoning the enemy.

War also means protecting
our families and defending our ideals, and putting our own lives on the line to
do so. War means seeing ourselves as part of a community, and recognizing that
the parts must sacrifice on behalf of the whole. The redemptive character of
war, that which makes it a mitzvah and a pursuit for our greatest and most
righteous, is found in living beyond ourselves, pursuing neither pleasure nor
power, but selfless purpose.

·Avraham goes to war not to demonstrate power or gain spoils, but to save
his brother-in-law;

·Shimon and Levi are guilty of excess, but they went to war to save their sister;

·Dovid haMelech cannot build the Beit haMikdash, but he fought the Plishtim
in order to save his nation.

In truth, this approach
requires more nuance; not every selfless fight is noble or heroic. The suicide
bomber also thinks he is pursuing selfless purpose in the name of country and
ideology. We need more discussion of what constitutes a “just war”, and that
will be part of our panel discussion before minchah, at 4:45 PM. But the
message I see in the Torah’s mitzvot of war is about not the glory of finishing
our foes, but the glory of risking one’s life for others and for ideals.

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein
made this point in an essay entitled The Ideology of Hesder. Describing
the mission of the yeshivot which blend Torah study with military service, he
wrote:

No one responsibly connected with any
yeshivat Hesder advocates military service per se… No less than every Jew, the
typical Hesdernik yearns for peace, longs for the day on which he can divest
himself of uniform and uzzi and devote his energies to Torah… In one
sense, therefore, insofar as army service is alien to the ideal Jewish vision, Hesder
is grounded in necessity rather than choice…

In another sense, however, it is very much l'hathillah,
a freely willed option grounded in moral and halakhic decision… We advocate it
because we are convinced that, given our circumstances - would that they were
better - military service is a mitsvah, and a most important one at
that.

This is the source of our
troubled history of righteous warriors – of Avraham and Yaakov, of Shimon and
Levi.

·The sword may not cut the stones of the mizbeiach, and Dovid haMelech
cannot build the Beit haMikdash, because war is corrupting; the Golden Calf
ensured that we must fight, as a bedieved concession to our imperfect
spirituality.

·But war is also an ennobling opportunity to live for others, to sacrifice
years, and possibly one’s life, to serve the nation. In that sense it may be
the greatest mitzvah we can perform.

In the beginning, Hashem
created a garden, and populated it with many trees. One of those trees was the
Tree of Life; eat from it וחי לעולם, and live forever. Another of those trees was the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil. We chose the latter, the fruit which gave us good
and evil combined, and the result was the blending of good and evil in all of
our pursuits, however noble. As a result, Chavah is told that bringing a baby
into this world will involve not only life, but also pain. Adam is told that
bringing food from the earth will involve not only life, but also pain. And
serving our nation, too, involves both life and pain.

May we soon know a day
when we will return to the Tree of Life, when the sin of the Golden Calf will
at last be expunged, when לא ישא גוי אל גוי חרב ולא ילמדו
עוד מלחמה – when
nation will not raise sword against nation and no longer will they study war,
when instead of מלאה הארץ חמס a land filled with chamas, we will have מלאה הארץ דעה את ד' כמים לים מכסים, a land filled with knowledge of G-d, as the sea is filled with
water.